THE E-SHOPPER.

Sweet-faced cookies, chocolate treats still tempting

May 27, 2002|By Michelle Slatalla, New York Times News Service.

I was in denial for a long time about my inability to handle the terrible responsibility of having sweets in the house.

Even after my children asked for the installation of a wall safe to secure their leftover Halloween candy, I was unable to acknowledge my problem. A responsible person, I was told, does not pillage the house like a werewolf, clawing frantically at a box of Girl Scout Thin Mints, gobbling handfuls of semisweet chocolate morsels or biting the heads off foil-wrapped bunnies.

I have tried to fight it. I stopped buying cookies. I threw out bags of candy. I bought a new bathroom scale. But still I lost my family's trust; I was recently caught trying to pry open the childproof cap on a bottle of kids' multivitamins (I just wanted one of the pink ones--they're the sweetest).

Yet last week, when I heard about two Internet sites that sell delicious edible treats, I felt a glimmer of hope. Perhaps for the first time in my life I might be able to train myself to place a cookie or a chocolate bar in a kitchen cabinet and just leave it there. Indefinitely.

The reason? The two companies, which operate the Web sites Club Photo and Trendy Chocolate, sell sweets that I might not be able to bear to eat. The firms would print any digital image I uploaded--a picture of one of my gap-toothed babies, my kindly mother, my floppy-eared dog--in full color onto an edible surface (like lemon icing or smooth white chocolate). The quality of the reproduction would be so good that I would have to think twice about biting the head off a loved one.

This would be apt penance, I figured. All I had to do to beat my addiction was to buy a cookie or a chocolate bar emblazoned with a photo I could not bear to bite.

Once the trusting smile of my daughter was printed onto food and then mailed to me, I would prominently display the treasure--and make no mistake, these are expensive nibbles, at prices like $34.44 for a Belgian chocolate bar (including shipping from Europe) from TrendyChocolate.com or $19.95 for six Rice Krispies treats on a stick from Club Photo. It would be in full view on the kitchen counter and I would walk past it every day, forcing myself to look at it.

That seemed foolproof.

When I told my husband my plan, he said, "That is so sick on so many levels that I don't know where to begin."

I was on to something.

Crucial to my plan was the purchase of a food product that would be a horrible torment not to eat. If I developed willpower against a fearsomely delicious foe, I could subsequently laugh in the face of the two stale Butterfinger bars that I suspected were lurking inside a manila envelope taped to the underside of my daughter's dresser.

I was torn between the two Internet sites. Club Photo (www.clubphoto.com), based in California, offered a wide selection of more affordable sweets for the bulk eater, like Chocolate Photo Pops ($41.95 a dozen) and Amazing Photo Cookies ($39.95 for a gift tin containing a dozen cookies). But Trendy Chocolate, operated by a Netherlands-based company called Trendy Boutique, (www.trendychocolate.com), sold that two-layer bar of Belgian chocolate.

I sought more information about how the products are made.

"It's a sophisticated process," said Tom Petz, Club Photo's e-commerce product manager. "We put the cookie in a machine that prints the image using FDA-approved food coloring. It's like a very, very sophisticated inkjet printer."

"They are prepared every day," Petz said, "and while they cool overnight, we prepare a lemon frosting, which is a trick in itself because it has to be a frosting without bubbles, because if you've got bubbles in the image, you've got trouble."

"Just out of curiosity, do you have any samples you could send?" I asked. "So I could check out the, um, lack of surface bubbles?"

"I have some old samples lying around," he said. "I'll send them, but don't eat them, they might be stale."

"I won't."

The next day, I ripped open the package of two cookies and immediately ate one. It was slightly stale. So I ate the other one. By the way, the generic photo images were no deterrent to me; one was a smiling child and I think the other a building--I was eating pretty fast. But they appeared clear, bright and defined.

Meanwhile, I placed an order for a Trendy Chocolate bar . When I placed the order, it was almost criminally easy to upload the digital image of my daughter.

Todd Brabender, a spokesman for Trendy Boutique, assured me I would not be disappointed.

"This is a very big bar--very popular on Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, for graduations--and the white chocolate layer on top is actually on a bed of three-quarter-inch milk chocolate on the bottom," Brabender said. "It comes from a very delicious chocolate factory in Europe."

Brabender has ordered three Trendy Chocolate bars. So far.

"If you don't want to eat the photo, there's a trick," he said. "Take that top, the white chocolate part, off, and eat the bottom dark part and put the white chocolate with the photo in a freezer," he said.

"Stop," I shrieked, "don't tell me how to beat the system. I'm not listening. I can't hear you."